Interview: Snow Software, Cloud Excellence Awards winner

Cloud use has spiked in the last year, and most companies aren't limiting their adoption to a single vendor. More and more, multi-cloud is the standard approach for businesses to unlock best-in-breed capabilities. But working across multiple clouds has its own challenges: integration, sprawl, performance and management among them.

The answer is to adopt a cloud management tool: a solution that can handle workflow orchestration, provisioning and self-service capabilities to make multi-cloud the cost-saving strategy it was always meant to be.

Snow Software specialises in software, SaaS and cloud management, making its Snow Commander product a fitting winner at last year's Cloud Excellence Awards, where judges named it Cloud Management Solution of the Year.

As well as Commander's workflow orchestration, agentless inventory and visibility of resources across multiple environments, Jay Litkey - EVP of Cloud Management at Snow Software - says the tool is uniquely suited to addressing modern business challenges:

"[Snow Commander] provides integrated hybrid cloud cost visibility, savings recommendations, and automation of cloud cost remediation measures - a significant challenge for many organisations today who are supporting the pivot to remote work."

Snow Software acquired Snow Commander at the same time it purchased original developer, Embotics - just 10 months before the Awards. Litkey, who founded Embotics in 2006, says handling the integration into Snow's corporate structure at the same time as the coronavirus pandemic was a challenge, but is proud of how both companies worked to handle it:

"12 months ago, Embotics had just been acquired by Snow and we were very early in our integration with the company. At the same time, we were being brought into the Snow family, we were still developing and releasing features to support the evolving needs of our customers. And then the pandemic hit.

"The entire Snow organisation made significant pivots to ensure that our customers and partners received the best advice, support and collaboration we could provide. With the sudden shift to remote work, we developed an Essential Resources series to offer industry expertise, especially for those organisations who were making a concerted acceleration to the public cloud, or needed advice about how to manage and orchestrate their workloads to keep cloud spending in check.

"We also released capabilities designed to help stakeholders across the organisation ensure they were receiving value from the resources and licenses they may already have had in place, for example with our support for Microsoft Azure Hybrid Use Benefit to avoid paying for unnecessary licenses."

Litkey expects that firms will continue to need help with visibility and control across their IT infrastructure this year, and says the events like the Cloud Excellence Awards are important to recognise companies providing that aid:

"These awards provide the opportunity to champion individuals and businesses that have excelled in their industries and celebrate their achievements - particularly within this tricky climate. It brings industries together and showcases the extraordinary developments taking place. This has been a true highlight for Snow. As well as celebrating our own success, we've been able to witness some astonishing achievements made by other companies during this time."

The Cloud Excellence Awards will return later this year.